Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
•••

Nadine Rouphael

Saliva-based SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing

As the Atlanta area recovers from Zeta, we’d like to highlight this Journal of Clinical Microbiology paper about saliva-based SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing. It was a collaboration between the Hope Clinic and investigators at Johns Hopkins, led by epidemiologist Christopher Heaney.

Infectious disease specialists Matthew Collins, Nadine Rouphael and several colleagues from Emory are co-authors. They organized the collection of saliva and blood samples from Emory COVID-19 patients at several stages: being tested, hospitalized, and recovered. Saliva samples were collected by having participants brush their gum line with a sponge-like collection device. More convenient than obtaining blood or sticking a swab up the nose!

Saliva collection instrument

The paper shows that antiviral antibody levels in saliva parallel what’s happening in patients’ blood. However, some forms of antibodies (IgM) appear less in saliva because of their greater molecular size. People who test positive do so by 10 days after symptom onset.

The authors conclude: “Saliva-based assays can be used to detect prior SARS-CoV-2 infection with excellent sensitivity and specificity and represent a practical, non-invasive alternative to blood for COVID-19 antibody testing…  A logical next step would be to perform a head-to-head comparison of this novel saliva assay with other antibody tests approved for clinical use.”

Read more

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Hope Clinic part of push to optimize HIV vaccine components

Ten years ago, the results of the RV144 trial– conducted in Thailand with the help of the US Army — re-energized the HIV vaccine field, which had been down in the dumps. It was the first vaccine clinical trial to ever demonstrate any efficacy in preventing HIV. The Hope Clinic of Emory Vaccine Center has been involved in efforts to build on the RV144 trial’s promising results. These early-stage studies have been optimizing the best vaccine components and techniques for larger vaccine efficacy trials, some of which are now underway.

Nadine Rouphael, interim director of the Hope Clinic, was first author on a recent paper in Journal of Clinical Investigation, reporting a multi-center study from the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. HVTN is headquartered at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“Our study shows that there are tools available to us now to improve on the immunogenicity seen in RV144, which may lead to better efficacy in future field trials,” Rouphael says. (See statement on the HVTN 105 study here.) Read more

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment